Visionaries eBook

“But you must paint me as I wish, not as you
will,” resumed Berenice. “I hate
conventional portraits. Papa Mineur chills me
with his cabinet pictures of haughty society ladies,
their faces as stiff as their starched gowns.”

“Oh, Berenice, will you never say polite things
of your father?”

“Never,” she defiantly replied. “He
wouldn’t believe me if I did. No, Hubert,
I want to pose as Ophelia. Oh, don’t laugh,
please!” They could not help it, and she leaped
to the grass and called out:—­

“I don’t mean a theatrical Ophelia, singing
songs and spilling flowers; I mean Ophelia drowned—­”
she threw herself on the sward, her arms crossed on
her bosom, and in the moonlight they could see her
eyes closed as if by death.

“Help me down, Hubert. That girl will go
mad some day.” He reached the earth and
he gave her a hand. Berenice had arisen.
Sulkily she said:—­

“Shall I step into the Dark Tarn of Auber and
float for you? I’ll make a realistic picture,
my Master Painter—­who paints without imagination.”
And then she darted into the shrubbery and was lost
to view. Without further speech the two regained
the path and returned to the house.

II

THE CRIMSON SPLASH

When Eloise was asked by Berenice how long Monsieur
Mineur would remain away on his tour, she did not
reply. Rather, she put a question herself:
why this sudden solicitude about the little-loved stepfather.
Berenice jokingly answered that she thought of slipping
away to Switzerland for a vacance on her own
account. Eloise, who was not agreeable looking,
viewed her charge suspiciously.

“Young lady, you are too deep for me. But
you’ll bear watching,” she grimly confessed.
Berenice skipped about her teasingly.

“I know something, but I won’t tell, unless
you tell.”

“What is it?”

“Will you tell?”

“Yes.”

“When is he coming back, and where is he now?”
she insisted.

“Your father, you half-crazy child, expects
to return in a month—­by the first of June.
And if you wish to wire or write him, let me know.”

“Now I won’t tell you my secret,”
and she was off like a gale of wind. Eloise shook
her head and wondered.

In the atelier Hubert painted. Elaine sat on
a dais, her hands folded in her lap; about her head
twisted nun’s-veiling gave her the old-fashioned
quality of a Cosway miniature—­the very effect
he had sought. It was to be a “pretty”
affair, this picture, with its subdued lighting, the
face being the only target he aimed at; all the rest,
the suave background, the gauzy draperies, he would
brush in—­suggest rather than state.

“I’ll paint her soul, that sensitive soul
of hers which tremulously peeps out of her eyes,”
he thought. Elaine was a patient subject.
She took the pose naturally and scarcely breathed
during the weary sittings. He recalled the early
gossip and sought to evoke her as a professional model.
But he gave up in despair. She was hopelessly
“ladylike,” and to interpret her adequately,
only the decorative patterns of earlier men—­Mignard,
Van Loo, Nattier, Largilliere—­would translate
her native delicacy.